RE: Steemit Strategy - Your "Quality" Content Isn't Valuable
Excellent article. I've resteemed it because I think it's so important for people to read! I like your take on it, even though it does feel negative in many places.
I well understand that my main weakness is my lack of willingness/ability to market myself. That's always been a problem of me because I do have an underlying shyness that keeps me from really putting myself out there. The stuff I'm offering "for free" right now have generally been offered elsewhere and have done "okay" (in the case of the photos) or not really got there (the fiction) - and I figure that pennies is better than nothing - especially since I can always repost the same crap in a year or whenever.
I had been discouraged originally from upvoting my own posts with the idea that it discourages others from upvoting a newbie because they won't get the first vote... However, since my posts are now regularly getting 0.20 and more (yes, that's a significant step for me) I may begin self-voting again. Very fortunately, I did choose to upvote the episode which got curied. :-)
I know what you mean about people not adding value to their posts. I'm sometimes guilty of this myself when I just want to get a picture out - since that is one of my strengths along with my writing. I do always describe something in the picture though - even if it is simply to say what plant it is - or express the fact that I don't know! I've seen so many people who don't bother even that much - and expect my upvote or curation (when I'm doing the pay-it-forward contest) and a picture with no explanation does not get my vote! What's worse, is when people use a picture that is very clearly not theirs - and they still can't be bothered to say anything about it!
(I was really, really excited to have my vote increase to 0.02 yesterday after I steemed up again - now at 80 SP. My goal is to make $100 real money by the end of the year - preferably in one month. Maybe...)
Anyway, thanks for the great article. And thanks for your time/effort supporting me. It means a lot!
Thanks for commenting and sharing. I do appreciate it. Congrats on reaching a new threshold. I would say that $100 by the end of the year is very achievable. I think you are doing many of the correct things to get there such as interacting with people and building relationships. Eventually, this tends to payoff in my experience. Everyday doesn't have to be a perfectly written post, but the good posts should outweigh the quicker posts so people can feel good about giving you their vote even when they can't read it everyday (like me).
There is NOTHING wrong with upvoting your own post. I am so tired of hearing that from people. Let me give you an example. I upvote all my own comments but usually after 3 days have passed. Why, because it's my money and I can spend it how I want, but also because everyone that upvotes my comments gets better curation because of it. For example - Person A has only 0.001 upvote, but they want to show me some thanks for giving them .10 or more on their post. They upvote my comment. They will make nothing on that curation because the comment wouldn't reach the .03 threshold to get a payout. I upvote my comment and not only do I get paid, but they get curation rewards that they wouldn't received beforehand. I give them first crack at upvoting (3 days) my comment.
Another thing I do is I use upvoting bots. Sometimes several and sometimes less depending on the situation. If everyone that follows me was to auto upvote my posts at 30 minutes, they would get more curation because when the bot votes come in, they will receive a better percentage of the curation rewards. The bots generally do not give me much of a profit (sometimes I lose money on the deal), but that is my risk. The people who follow me are still going to benefit in curation no matter what as long as they "beat the bots" to my post. As opposed to upvoting a post that is going to get a total of 5 to 10 votes.
I am writing some posts for this week that details how this works in both vote bots, curation and curation trails, and other strategies for newbies/minnows.
Talk to you soon and keep up your good work.
It will be interesting to see what you have to say about vote bots. I find a few of the free bots to be worth the effort such as the resteem bot and the steemit world map bot (the originalworks bot was another one,) but the only paid bot that seems to make sense to me is the steem basic income. I currently have three shares, and have won a fourth - I've paid for only one myself for a minnow who asked a good question on my fiction, prompting an "ask the author" post. :-)
Still, my upvote alone isn't worth much, so I'm guessing - especially after reading @thedarkhorse's article about getting out of the dust - it didn't actually make any sense for me to self-vote until now. So, that's a caveat worth adding to your original article in this case - that the self-vote only makes sense if the posts are getting at least 0.03!
There's also something in getting the length of the post correct - too long is bad, too short is equally bad - and catchy - when I do a photo salvage, I put the outcome at the beginning because the original isn't going to bring in readers - that's the whole point of the salvage! When I do my fiction, I hate keeping the posts short because my chapters were written to be longer than what I want to do for a single post - and sometimes it doesn't want to break into nice, need 2-3 page sections, but that's what I do, because people's attention spans are short.
Anyway, thanks for commenting. Catch you later.